Closer - Unfolding Noise From The Future
The
world is awash in sound. Some sounds comfort us. They lift you up and
make you smile. Others agitate us. They boil the liquid in your eyes and
make your teeth scream.
Right now I'm sitting in an inner-city cafe
and I can distinguish somewhere around a dozen sounds. There is the
chatter of customers, the assured clink of cup on dish as the staff
clean up another empty, the welcoming robotic pleasantries of the
counter staff, the looping buzz of the fan above my head, footsteps ( high heels most likely ) from the floor upstairs, the 90s acid-jazz
soundtrack from the speaker to my left and the crinkle of a crisp
wrapper a toddler is fingering to my right.
When you think of sound like
that you begin to wonder how people relax at cafes at all. Yet relax I
do. As we all do. The modern world is so flooded with sound that we have evolved to
ignore most of it unless we stop to pay attention.
Music can be noise. We all know music we consider aggravating. One
person's Miles Davis is another person's Miley Virus. Yet it isn't something
we can't easily tune out from as we can with other daily distractions. Music is more personal. We form opinions and setup
roadblocks.
The
music of noise is a curious thing. It's not really my cup of tea. It's a
big thing here in Japan though and some of the biggest names in the biz
can be heard playing at a bar not far from my doorstep. I ventured in
there a few times - to that dark, angry basement. I always left feeling
generally dizzy, disturbed and fortunate not to have payed an entry
fee.
So
when I was invited to listen to the latest offering of music from
Australian ambient artist Closer ( Liam Daly ), who describes his music as using noise
and tape-hiss, I wasn't exactly scrambling for my headphones.
